ABSTRACT
Field research (Yilmaz and Chatterjee, 2000) has shown that most processes in services such as transport, billing, payroll, customer order entry, baggage handling, etc., are at less than a 3.5 Sigma quality level. The rate of defects tends to be more than 23,000 parts per million (ppm) or 97.7 per cent efficiency. If the level of Sigma quality processes can improve to something above four Sigma the defect rate would drop to 6210 ppm. This clearly shows a potential performance improvement process of 3.7 times: the yield of the process would reach 99.38 per cent. This would bring significant financial returns for all organizations engaged in continuous improvement programmes such as the Lean and Digitize method. In fact, in most countries the manufacturing sector is less and less relevant. The real economy in these countries involves areas such as finance, consulting, healthcare, retail and logistics, but much less manufacturing, which tends to move overseas to low-cost countries. The Lean and Digitize method can help in this case, reducing the cost of poor quality and obtaining a more consistent process for providing excellent services.
